Actress Taraji P. Henson recently got emotional when she opened up about the pay disparity she faced during her time in Hollywood.
While speaking at Sirius XM to promote her new film, The Color Purple, Henson was asked by host Gayle King if the rumors that he was considering quitting acting were true. Immediately, Henson broke down in tears and said, “I'm just tired of working so hard, being kind at what I do, and getting paid a fraction of the cost.”
“I'm tired of hearing my sisters say the same thing over and over again. You get tired. I hear people say, “You work too hard.” Well, you have to. Mathematics is not mathematics. When you start working a lot, you have a team. Big bills come with what we do. We don't do it alone. It's a whole team behind us. They must be paid.”
“When you hear someone say, 'So-and-so made $10 million,' that didn't go into their account,” Henson explained. “From the top, Uncle Sam gets one percent. Now you have $5 million. Your team gets 30 percent of what you collect, not after what Uncle Sam got. Now do the math. I am human.”
She continued: “Every time I do something and break another glass ceiling, when it's time to renegotiate, I'm back at the bottom like I never did what I just did and I'm tired. I'm tired. It wears on you. What does this mean? What does that tell me?'
At this point, Taraji P. Henson began to cry, pointing to her younger co-star Danielle Brooks: “If I can't fight for them to come after me, then what the hell am I doing?”
“Twenty plus years in the game and I hear the same thing and see what you do for another production but when it comes time to go bat for us they don't have enough money. And I just have to grin and grin and bear it. That's enough! That's why I have more [brands] because this industry, if you let it, will steal your soul. I refuse to let that happen.”
This isn't the first time Taraji P. Henson has addressed the issue of wage inequality. In 2021, Henson shared that she was “gutted” when she took home just $40,000 for her role in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. This was far less than what he had asked for, which he said “at that point in my career, it was fair for the ticket sales I would contribute to this big film.”
In 2019, she revealed to Variety that she had asked for half a million dollars for her role in the film and was only offered $100,000. “I was only asking for half a million – that's all. This is. When I did “Benjamin Button,” I wasn't worth a million yet. My audience still knew me. We thought we were asking for what was fair to me at the time,” he said Variety.